“A lot of areas around the water in Cambridge have a high demand,’’ Devin O’Brien, head of strategic marketing at Zumper, told Boston.com. “A little of this has to do with new construction [in Cambridge]. If an area has a new luxury construction, that can bump up the total average of the area as a whole.’’

Cambridge saw a variety of new luxury developments along the water this year, such as Twenty|20 and The Zinc, both in East Cambridge.

Some of the Cambridge neighborhoods with fast-growing rents are also among the most purely expensive areas of the Boston metro. The median one-bedroom rent in MIT/Kendall, for example, is $3,510, beating out even Downtown Boston.

High-end areas in Boston might not appear on the fastest-rising-rents list, but that doesn’t mean they’re cheap. Rents in Back Bay only rose 1.1 percent, but that’s still enough for a median one-bedroom price of $2,800.

Other notoriously expensive neighborhoods, however, actually saw a decrease in rent prices. In the North End, prices fell 2.7 percent to a median of $2,500.

’’It could be that rents were higher than they should have been in the last year,’’ O’Brien said. “It’s not to say these neighborhoods aren’t more expensive than [other neighborhoods]. They were overpriced in the past.’’